What do you do as an owner, manager or front line team member to create ‘Raving Fans’ out of your customers?   Do you as an owner or manager create ‘Raving Fans’ out of your employees?

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart

Those of us old enough to have been privileged to attend College in the late ’80′s and after surely remember motivational management expert Ken Blanchard and his award winning book “The One Minute Manager“.   This is one of his great books, but it over shadows what I think is an even greater book, “Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service“, released in 1993.   What exactly are ‘Raving Fans”?   They are people that are so impressed with your company and products that they go out and tell everyone they know.    The flip side of that coin is reducing the ‘Raving Foes, those that go out and tell everyone know about their terrible experience. Define what kind of experience you expect your customer to have when they interact with the company at any level. Set Expectations that your customer will experience and set expectations for what will happen during the interaction.

Involve all levels of your company in this, they will take ownership of ensuring that the expectations are met on their end. Then tell them, tell anyone and everyone what you expect them to experience each and every time they come back.    Go back to those customers and potential customers and give them your promise.    The bottom line of creating Raving fans out of your customers is to go back to the basics, fine tune everything.   Add value wherever possible.   the bigger companies that you compete against have this working against them.   they cannot initiate attitude changes company wide like can be done in a small business   When they have retail and ecommerce working together, your talking about a huge investment and culture change to accomplish what can be done in a small business in less than a week.

Think about it for a minute, in this day and age, where one financial institutions’ bad decisions cascaded into the collapse of the entire financial market, however fragile and mis-directed it was.    Several days of mob mentality and bad press can wipe out an entire brand, company and the millions and even billions of dollars behind building the brand and company in the first pace.   One company that exemplifies this most of all was Sizzler Steakhouse.   A little bit of bad press for a prescription drug and days later it is off the market, jobs are gone, companies are in ruins and everyone who ever took even 1 pill or think they may have is hunting for a good lawyer.   Now more than ever is the time to focus constantly and refocus often on the most important objective of them all, creating raving fans throughout the business model.

In his easy to read, straight flowing style, Blanchard takes the reader on a pathway to understanding of who the customer is and how this applies to all levels of the business.   First, who is the customer? We have both internal and external customers.  As the owner of a company, my internal customers are my employees,  I have to give them a quality product, brought to them using quality delivery systems with thorough product training to enable them to rave about the products to my and their external customers, our clients.   as the Ecommerce Manager my internal customers are my sales and customer service departments and we all share the same external customers.   To my vendors, their external customer is me, my staff and my customers, their internal customer is their sales staff and delivery system staff etc….   My ‘Raving Fans’, my staff go out everyday and turn our customers into our ‘Raving Fans’   In the extended portion of this concept, my employees friends see how much they love their jobs and enjoy it and my staff bring in the best ones to grow our culture.   I’ve seen this happen personally and it is a wonderful feeling of accomplishment.

To me, avoiding ‘Raving Foes’ is the easiest part of the picture.   We all make mistakes.  If your not making a mistake every now and then, your not trying hard enough.   As long as we learn, grow and don’t repeat it then no problem.   No one can please 100% of the people 100% of the time, that is just how it is, there will always be someone.   If the mistake is our fault, apologize, admit it, resolve it quickly without passing the ball and make the customer happy.   No matter how mad someone might get at us, no matter how upset someone may be because I will not refund shipping charges both ways on something they purchased incorrectly, I wan t them to walk away saying to themselves, “they sure did upset me, but they exceeded expectations trying to ensure that I understand why and making me want to purchase from them in the future if for no other reason, their integrity.”   Exceeding expectations is something you will see quite often in my postings so get used to it.

Creating ‘Raving Fans’ is fairly straight forward and does work when the concept is grown within the company with full cooperation.   First and most importantly, talk to your employees, talk to your customers, talk to your potential customers.   Listen to what they retail you about their experiences.

Be consistent!  Once everyone is behind you in your company, this is the new standard, and must be held up at all costs   This is your niche.   It may not be price, but it will definitely be value.   You must hold staff members, vendors… everyone, accountable to upholding the commitments that you have made to one of your most important assets, your customers.    Customer compliments and letters must be held up and touted to everyone as though they just hit a grand slam in the world series.

To wrap this all up let me say this:   In this world we have created for ourselves and the current air of the uncertainty that is pervasive in all areas of our future.   What is any companies most important assets?  The employees and the customers.   as ‘Raving Fans’ they ensure growth and success, even today!   Most companies best customers, the ones that are truly their ‘Raving Fans’, start out as a ‘Raving Foe’, with some sort of problem or issue that someone in your organization decided to go above and beyond to take care of.   The perfect example that shows how possible this really is.

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